While Heavenly Creatures and The Frighteners had shown there was more to the director’s repertoire than splatter satires, The Lord of the Rings was a leap of faith. Would he have to curtail his natural excesses to be epic? Was there a nascent Cecil B. DeMille or John Ford or David Lean beneath the crash zooms and wacky angles?
Perhaps the better question to ask is what was there in the flare and versatility of Jackson that so befitted The Lord of the Rings? As the pitch documentary proclaimed, he couldn’t have been more thorough in his development of the films. The labour of screenwriting was providing him a narrative roadmap — quite literally in terms of location — as well as inspiring camera moves. But Jackson’s instincts split between groundwork and natural daring. He was a thrilling stylist who had seen as many slasher movies as Lawrence of Arabias. He was a technically brilliant storyteller guided by an inner Einstein with no space or time for formulaic thinking.
Nevertheless, his governing principle possessed a Kiwi-like directness: ‘I was trying to make it feel real. It wasn’t so much thinking about what can I do differently, rather than what can I do for the story? We really approached it like it was real; this is authentic, it is not fantasy, it is a piece of the past.’
Jackson is the artist who once cooked special effects in his mum’s oven. Who made ‘realistic’ alien vomit out of yogurt, pea green food colouring and baked beans. When he found the consistency too runny he added handfuls of soil before his Bad Taste actors dug in. Back in those early days he even made puke by hand. He loves the tactile — the texture of the world. Braindead is an orgy of sensation. The sheer blood-drenched chaos pours off the screen until you feel sticky just watching it. Inches out of shot you sense the gleeful filmmaker caked in his own stage blood laughing till his lungs burst. When he watched Harryhausen it was as if he could reach out and touch those strange creatures.
‘That’s what I loved about Pete’s approach,’ says Boyens, ‘and made me feel this was the right person. This guy who did Braindead and Meet the Feebles — no matter what he did he wanted it to feel real and earthy, and there’s a lot of earthiness in Tolkien’s work.’
It was Lee and Howe who revealed the dizzying scale of Middle-earth, and warned him not to giggle.
‘Everything was always bigger than I thought, and better,’ he says. The artists, rooted in Tolkien’s grandeur, would always go way beyond what was in his head. Design meetings became thrilling symposiums where the world expanded before his eyes. Not to be outdone, he soon started pushing them for even bigger and better.
He had become fascinated by Lee’s cover painting of a flooded Orthanc on his well-thumbed copy of The Two Towers: the black, angular walls ascended out of frame, carved with vertical crenulations like the scratches of a blade and wreathed in moody smoke. But the picture only covered the lower four stories. Like many readers, Jackson longed to know what the top of the tower looked like. Only he got to ask. ‘I was able to show Alan the picture, which I had lived with for years, and say, “Just create the rest of the tower.”’
Lee unveiled an awe-inspiring Gothic skyscraper whose riven sides tapered to a flat summit with blades jutting from each corner like the peaks of an iron crown. Orthanc was fixed in our minds for ever more.
This search for the real in the unreal was a universal obsession. No individual in the swelling ranks of the production was prepared to let their corner of Middle-earth go by unverified by a form of collective integrity. Lee would go through a sequence of sketches that gradually ‘crystallized’ into the ideal image by ‘natural selection’. In other words, he would keep drawing until it made sense, imagining himself inside the picture examining every possible angle for the scene to come.
‘Each image was a virtual place that had to be completely consistent.’
They could exaggerate, but Lee and Howe would know intuitively if the credibility of the story was threatened. ‘You wanted people to suspend disbelief for the time that they’re there,’ says Howe — there were points you could assume magic was at work. ‘In the case of Barad-dûr, you can’t build stone that high. It falls down. So I assumed Sauron has put some dark power into the foundations.’
Indeed, when Sauron is destroyed with the Ring, the tower disintegrates like pie-crust.
The two artists would design every facet of a building inside and out far beyond the bounds of what we see on screen, satisfying their own insistent logic. Imagining Orthanc’s summit, Lee provided the outline of a doorway in one of the fins to explain how Saruman gained access to the roof. ‘There are stairways leading all the way up,’ he maintains. ‘You don’t see it because it is so dark.’
Like the writing and the designing of the film, how it would be made on the levels of lighting and planning shots, practical and computer-generated effects, editing, music and sound design, would be answered by varying degrees of near scientific research and making it up as they went along. The belief they would find a way to work wonders. But it was a practical magic.
Jackson was to an extent letting Middle-earth guide him. Storyboarding and pre-visualization had the same aura of experimentation. As the scripts were being written — and rewritten — he and a young protégé named Christian Rivers began to storyboard the film. The affable, multitalented Rivers had become a permanent fixture in Jackson’s inner circle after his fan letter led to an invitation to lend a hand on Braindead (Rivers insists that he called). A gifted artist, he has storyboarded every Jackson film since, as well as branching out in both divisions of Weta (he was a digital artist on the Contact effects sequence).
In layman’s terms, ‘pre-viz’ denotes the mapping out of camera moves ahead of time on a computer, usually concentrated on the more complicated sequences. Today, pre-viz is done within virtual environments — as it would be on The Hobbit films — but in 1999 the only sequence planned with animated pre-viz was the fight with the Cave-troll (they would later digitally pre-viz the mûmakil attack for The Return of the King). Otherwise, their unofficial, analogue variation of pre-viz amounted to Jackson crouched over Weta’s growing portfolio of miniatures holding a tiny ‘lipstick’ camera.
‘You always have a perception of what it could be in your head when you write a script. But it gives you a chance to play around with it. I am always looking for other angles. It gives you an ability to actually explore and experiment.’
With the thirty-foot miniature of Helm’s Deep, complete with the Hornburg keep, Deeping Wall and polystyrene cliffsides recently constructed with Lee’s assistance, Jackson went out and bought 5,000 1/32nd scale plastic soldiers. ‘Sort of Medieval guys with pikes,’ he reports happily, having cleaned out Wellington’s toyshops. A poor soul spent two weeks laboriously gluing them down in groups of twelve to blocks of wood so the director could move formations of Uruk-hai around like Napoleon.
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Meanwhile back in Hollywood, following the fateful meeting with Bob Shaye, lawyers’ phones began to sing. Three separate deals had to be struck: one with Miramax, a new one with Saul Zaentz and one with Peter Jackson. Most pressingly, Miramax were due to be reimbursed their development costs. Kamins had been clear about Harvey’s terms when setting up the meeting. He wasn’t going to be accused of ‘buffaloing’ anyone; getting everyone excited then springing the exorbitant catch on them, which included executive producer credits for the Weinsteins. Shaye admitted the terms of the deal had almost dissuaded him from the meeting, but forty-eight hours afterwards he was on the phone to Harvey.
Says Kamins, ‘Harvey must have dropped the receiver, I don’t think he believed for five minutes this would happen.’
He came around quickly enough. Scenting he could both reclaim his investment and land five percent of the gross with no further risk on his part, he switched back into street-dealer mode. And saw the wisdom in allowing an extension to his initial four-week stipulation for a signature.
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